Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Monday July 29, 2013 @08:08PM
from the get-the-hell-out-of-our-galaxy dept.

New submitter nusscom writes "On July 28th, as has been reported by BBC, a record number of EVE Online players participated in a record-breaking online battle between two alliances. This battle, which was essentially a turf-war was comprised of over 4,000 online players at one time. The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity."
This is the largest battle to ever occur on EVE Online.

It's not a hard cap, it changes to match actual server load. The more they 'reinforce' the node(aka put it on the good machines) the better the numbers get. Can't wait for some serious cluster upgrades on the CCP end.

I started my account after hearing about the last huge battle a few months ago and very coincidentally uninstalled EVE the day after this battle. When the game is fun, it's great, but there's SOO much downtime in between PVP fights (PVE, PI, mining and such get old fast). CCP took the approach of more content rather than focusing on playability and new players get a truckload dumped in their laps. The UI is murder on new players and even the plugins could use a major upgrade or at least more consistency with colors. I had major friendly fire annoyances with color tags that were too close or misleading.

Game could be fun if there was more interaction, but from my experience there's a lot of spinning ships in station and yacking on Mumble. My two recommendations would be for CCP to create true CCP-sponsored corporations that stage lots of PVP and training against each other (much like the Blue and Red do) and do away with the non-functional NPC noob corps where new toons get dumped. Second, they need to improve the UI standardize that overview. The colors and codes are head scratching and sometimes *way* too similar.

The curve is just too high for people looking to have fun and not turn the game into a way of life. I felt barely competent after 4 months of play.

Try three years. Nobody is really competent in this game. If you are looking for fun in the game play you won't really find it, I've had more fun chatting with the people I met there, maybe while doing things which may or may not be tangentially related to the actual game play. It is an MMO after all.

Think of it as an open sandbox. There isn't any purpose to any single pile of sand, except to individuals who are creative and persistent enough to sculpt something out of it, and changes made inside the sandbox has long lasting legacy (if not impact) for future users of that sandbox.

If you think of EVE Online as a means to an end, not the end in itself, it makes much more sense. Consider that in other games, the achievements within often are the end in themselves. While being the first group to beat a raid boss in WoW might get you talked about for a week, pulling off a legendary heist or being a double agent to take down an empire results in the party responsible still being referred to many years later. This is the kind of thing that EVE Online provide that no other games out there have.

To do what you want and have fun. I know this is a foreign concept to veterans of other MMOs who have been brainwashed into thinking that fun == reaching endgame, but as soon as you break out of that way of thinking, a huge amount of possibilities open up.

When I started playing eve, I subscribed at the same time as 3 other friends. We formed a corp, picked a.5 system bordered by several lowsec systems, and based out of there. After about a week of playing, we announced to anyone we saw in system that we were pirates and started demanding protection money from the local miners. No one paid up, so we read up on canflipping mechanics and started stealing their ore. Then we figured out how to suicide gank and racked up quite a few expensive mining barges that way. Eventually one of us pissed off the wrong person and a rather powerful mission running corp filled with veterans who had been around for years declared war on us. We read up on wardec mechanics, and won that through by exploiting the fact that an industrial is no match for three people in competently fit pvp ships, no matter what the player ages are. That got us into the business of wardecs, and we ended up merging with another corp at about the three month mark in our eve careers. From there we spent a good three years terrorizing people in highsec for isk, with some side interests of ninja salvaging and scamming.

The end result of all of my time playing is that I legitimately ruined the lives of several people (drama queens make great targets, several corps we went after had members who are now no longer RL friends), have two scams named after my scamming character, and made some awesome online friends. And when I flew through our old home system recently after after having been unsubbed for two years, the miners apparently still remembered me. Within minutes of entering the system they all docked up and immediately began cussing me out in local chat, so apparently I made a lasting impression on them.

Interestingly enough that is the sort of game play that certain three letter organisations look for when it comes to matching people's real world actions with their game actions. Not that all game players that do bad things in game, do bad things in real life but people who do bad things in life inevitably do bad things in game.

amen - the guy proudly says he lost several real-life friendships over this crap, and you think he might be the kind of guy who'll go to work one day with a shotgun? Well, I don't know, but it does seem he gets off much more with the notoriety than he does with human empathy.

Maybe we'll read about him in a few years when they catch him with a few body parts hacked up in his basement. But it'll be ok, 'cos he'll have made a load of great online friends while he was doing it.

As an 8-year player of EVE, I have heard this a whole lot. What you are really saying is, "I'm not good enough to play this game, waaaaaah". If you don't like it, don't play it. Much like I don't play Final Fantasy games, you're welcome not to play EVE. Some of us love it the way it is, and can appreciate where the good moments are without bitching about having to loadout ships or move assets to a system for a sov takeover.

The more you play the game, the more you get used to the interface. The good players(the real die-hards) love the UI, and know and use every inch of it. We need all of those displays for information, because otherwise we miss something important and die(not fun). You think it's bad when your Battlecruiser goes down? Imagine how we feel when our supers pop. Hell, I know people who run 4-6 clients at once, some running ships that cost over a billion isk on all of the screens. I believe the guy on the Alliance Tournament this weekend would call them 'richfags'.

The more you play, the less time you spend looking for controls and instead actually spend that time trading, building stuff, fighting, making iskies, whatever. You start to memorize components for your ships so you know exactly what equipment you want for what task. You get used to fleet formations and how to travel as a group without becoming the next Leroy Jenkins.

Don't like PVP? Go PVE, Faction Warfare, or be a Miner/Trader or something 'safe'. You can make assloads of currency with a quickness if you pay attention and know what you're doing. Shooting rocks too boring? Join a decent corp/alliance, and get in on these enormous battles. You can find some REALLY cool mods on the field after popping a few old-hat players in their special tourney ships.

It's a difficult game for sure, but the fact that you want everything just handed to you immediately with no work or waiting, having only played the game for a few months, says more about you than about the game.

And, your attitude, much like that of CCP in general I'm guessing, is why nothing changes and why EVE is a minor MMO. If you don't appeal to new players and simply dismiss criticisms of game complexity as some "l337 h4x0r IQ threshold" to keep stupid people out, EVE is going to stay right where it is. CCP seems to have this philosophy that anything that exists in the game is acceptable as an artifact of the game world. They don't have to assume everything that exists is as it was meant to be. Make it be

They seem to have a very self-superior attitude as though they are just better because they play a Bettar Game(tm) and if you aren't good enough to hang with them then screw you, you suck! However on the other hand they hate the other MMOs because they take players away. The wish there was no WoW, no Rift, etc so that people HAD to play EVE.

Basically, what they really want is a large quantity of people who are not good at the game that they can pick on and hate on. They want to be the ruling class that has a lower class to shit on. They are bullies, more or less.

He's mad at you because you tried the game and left, rather than stuck around to give him another potential target to beat up.

I reopened my account a little under a month ago (originally quit when Diablo 3 came out, THAT game was a waste of time and money.). After two weeks back with my old alliance, spinning ships, AFKing in station, I joined a new one. Night and day. I have seen more action every day in the new alliance than all 2 weeks with the old one. The problem for me was that the old alliance had largely faded from glory and the remaining members are 80% people in a 1

Before I tried out Eve, I thought these epic space battles were technological breakthroughs. At the time, I was playing WoW was was restricted to 40 players and some mobs up at once. When I actually played Eve, I was quickly disillusioned. There are not many real-time controls in the game. You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time. I am not as experienced as a lot of you guys are and you may have other input, but I quickly gave it up because it was boring as hell to do something then wait 10 seconds until it completed.

This lets you focus on the core of the game. Strategy and tactics. It's not a flight simulator. Which guns will you fit on your ship, at what range will you engage, which ships do you not bother engaging and run away from, what skills you have, what skills you need to fight more efficiently.....

Totally. I am not knocking folks who enjoy that kind of game at all:) I think, if anything, is a pretty accurate simulation of what space would be like. Empty, quiet, not much action except on a few bases and sectors where there were resources. The newbie help channel was very beneficial -- the best community support in any game I've played (rightfully so, the UI is crazy). I was mostly speaking from a server technology standpoint. I marveled at how some random company could do better to handle user load t

You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time.

Actually, I like that aspect. It simulates how a ship commander works. It's analogous to Warcraft III. You put one peon to work, and he does it until you tell him otherwise. Just like me, you probably assumed you'd by flying the ship like a simulator such as X-Wing.

Your complaint is so generic, I feel like I'm reading about someone complaining that they have to move a mouse to click on something. How abstract and ubiquitous of a concept can you find to bitch about? As was said, it's not a flight simulator. Your job is to fly to the right place, lend your guns to the right team, and make better decisions than the other team. You are a pawn that trains to become a better piece. Like in Chess, you can't win if you're playing as a pawn all alone.

As a frequent nano pilot, I beg to differ.
Double click on a point in space, you fly there. Control you engine throttle manually, activate weapons, shield boosters, cap charges, warp scramble opponents, adjust transversal.. You call an action, it occurs. In any other game, you press button, thing happens. Are you instead referring to the lack of a flight stick style control method? If so then yes, you are correct. There is no flight stick or controller input. Are you perhaps talking about warping? That is a bit different as part of the game mechanics dictates that when you select a warp to target, you warp drive has to 'spin up' before you leave grid. This ensures you, as a potential victim, can't just run away without proper planning. Part of that whole 'risk-reward' system that EVE does so well.
The controls are definitely real time, though I do understand your position. The EVE style of input is definitely something that takes getting used to. It is not Wing Commander. Well, unless you are flying an interceptor, that is.;)

Before I tried out Eve, I thought these epic space battles were technological breakthroughs. At the time, I was playing WoW was was restricted to 40 players and some mobs up at once. When I actually played Eve, I was quickly disillusioned. There are not many real-time controls in the game. You pick an action, then when the game decides when it's time, it executes it. It's a queuing system and it's nearly turn-based, like Civilization. You aren't controlling your space craft in real time. I am not as experienced as a lot of you guys are and you may have other input, but I quickly gave it up because it was boring as hell to do something then wait 10 seconds until it completed.

Hahahaha.

Sure thing mate, orbit and F1, right?

You haven't played EVE at all if you think that you don't control your ship in real-time.

Well, you don't need the minecraft home servers to play offline. For offline only play it's entirely DRM free. Also, the server I plays on is regularly backed up, and when they hit the reset button (once a year or so), they leave the old world up for single player download.

In other words, even without hacked servers, the worlds will still be accessible long after Mojang bites the dust.

I was there (TM)
It's not just the battle. It's the buildup. For 4 days we worked the system. Disrupting the enemy, destroying infrastructure. In the background spies worked there magic and Logistics move the materials of war into position. The phyc-ops and propagandist people boosted moral an got people to log in and participate.
The battle is just one of the fun bits. 4000 pilots where just in the system. Without a doubt over 6000 pilots were involved on the day and closer to 10,000 for the buildup.
EvE is serious spaceship business and this whole war is business. In EvE we are not ashamed to admit. We went to war for the Space monies.

That sounds pretty cool, but one thing I didn't like is the spying aspect. Not because spying isn't cool, but because the spying is external to the game. People use their alts to see what's going on in an enemy corporation, then report back. CCP should either limit alts to NPC corps or to the same corp as main.

a battle like this would lose thousands of billions of isk. It was, and is a very fun game, if you get in with the right sort of corp. Solo, not so much. You need some kind of group to maintain even a small space station. But w

The thing is, the Real Money -> PLEX -> ISK thing is NOT the same as Real Money ISK

That intermediary item there changes things significantly, such that when you lose a big ship in EVE, unless you obtained it using PLEX, you didn't actually lose anything that was worth any real world money. Lots of media outlets made a big deal over "$9000 ship lost" when that Revenant was downed. The thing is - that guy didn't lose $9000. At worst he lost an opportunity to purchase $9000 worth of game subscription

I'm amazed how much effort people put playing games these days. I honestly think some like games (like EVE Online) are more like jobs than entertainment, if what I've read is any indication. Shit, if some people spent their time in the real world doing and learning things with the same level of zeal and dedication as they do in the virtual world, we might all be Tony Starks.:)

Having said that, the virtual world provides more immediate payoff for your efforts compared to the real world sometimes... which is probably what makes gaming so addictive.

Funny, I have been living with a girl for the past 5 years and just got engaged to be married. Pretty much everyone else I know in game has a girlfriend and a social life. A lot of us are professionals too, myself included (I'm a doctor). I think you've got the wrong demographic.

Chicks are chicks; so somebody that appears to be a chick, is in actual fact a chick.And guys are chicks; so I guess you intend to mean that some of those chicks (right hand side) are in reality just guys (on left hand side).But that would means that people that appear to be cops are in fact kids.

Or is it the other way around, that those who appear to be kids are actually cops and the ones that seem to be guys are in reality chicks?

"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"

Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.

it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.

Anarchy Online merged their servers earlier this year and now only runs a single world server, and while there are instances for missions (think 'dungeons') the world server itself really does just shove all the players together.

The load was so large that Crowd Control Productions (CCP) slowed down the game time to 10% of normal to accommodate the massive amount of activity.

"Its the same boring shit about how eve's terrible servers can't handle all the buffered state updates and slows to a crawl"

Or to see the half-full glass, it's a story about how EVE is the only MMO game that really even attempts to let stuff happen on this kind of scale; it's the only major single-server MMO, i.e., the only one that doesn't just cheat by only having as many people on any given 'instance' of the game as their server code can handle.

So, the story is their code and single-server suck because they can't handle the load, right? If the game has to slow to 10% how does that prove anything good? I can run a simulation on my home computer and have it run at 10^-100 slower than it would run on the cluster at work. It will run, but be slow as glass flowing at room temperature. When they can do that at 100%, I will be impressed.

Or you can play a game like Everquest 2 where the lag can get so bad sometimes (because SoE blows most likely) that it takes 20 secs for your button press to register, if not longer.

It's actually pretty slick how they throw in some uniform time dilation to ensure fair and timely performance across all n number of pilots in a fight while the resources are dynamically allocated to reinforce the fleet battle nodes. Definitely an improvement from the prior lopsided disconnects and variable frame times. Rather than the network or cluster deciding the battle, the players do. Since they are the *only* game in town that provides this sort of scenario, I find it rather intriguing to hear about the ceiling being pushed further and further.
There are many more questionably appropriate and even dull topics that are seen daily here. Internet spaceships and clever realtime server management don't seem so unwarranted.

Surprising that this topic is getting as much hate as it is. I can say as an 'on again, off again' EVE player that I really enjoy hearing these stories. As it goes, life is just too demanding at the moment and as the saying goes, "EVE is the best game I don't have time to play."
To each their own I suppose. If these stories were not posted here, they would still make my news feeds, so I could do without if that would satiate those who find it offensive.

Do you need time to play it? It uses the progress quest mechanic for player skills, doesn't it?

Yes (assuming you mean that it uses game-time based skill acquisition, where you set up a list of skills you want to acquire and your character slowly learns them whether you're playing or not). But unlike most modern MMOs which have interesting solo games, it's only really worth playing if you can get deeply involved in a guild (or corporation, to use the local terminology), which demands quite a bit of time in most cases.

That is an interesting idea to simulate combat confusion by reducing the amount of data you get back as the shooting gets worse. Except you are not commanding one ship, issuing orders to dozens of smaller ones.

the technology and organization outside of the game is also interesting - thousands of people acting in a coordinated manner to achieve a real-time goal using technology (mumble, jabber, irc) is news - even if the goal is (much) less impr

Here's an interesting page with a few nuggets of info. In the discussion section, some people claim that the game used to crash with space battles as small as 100 ships. Clearly the game has been improved since then.http://highscalability.com/eve-online-architecture [highscalability.com]

It is simulating a few more objects than those muds though. For example, each player is likely to have 5 drones (mini robot spaceships), which takes the number of moving entities that have to be simulated up to 24000...

i don't play eve (or any other MMO), but have been following it for a year. this is "stuff that matters" for 2 reasons

first is the server load. ccp swapped out the node that normally hosts the home world and used it for this battle, they slowed things down in a planned way (time dilation), and there was lag beyond that. so this battle was the limit of their technology. if ccp is able to handle battles like this, the battles will get bigger, so what comes next, from a server and software standpoint, should be interesting

but maybe the more interesting aspect is that outside of the game, the 2 coalitions have built up technology infrastructure for organizing and coordinating the players. prior to the battle there was a huge push to motivate players to log on similar to the promotional blitz for a new game or a movie. and during the battle much of the communication happens outside the game itself - multiple channels of mumble, jabber and the web

it's news when twitter enables the arab spring. and it's news (to me) when 4000 geeks get together using online tools and coordinate their actions to achieve some goal (however useless that goal might be)

as for the game itself, i played for a few hours and found it boring. it's nominally played in a huge 3d world, but the locations are largely limited to small regions around a 2d "grid". the number of ships and weapons is mind-boggling and complicated, and the actions all more or less amount to selecting an from a menu, eg you don't aim at a target, you select it from a list. so after a few hours i found myself wishing it had a command line interface and quit

I agree. Eve online is pretty interesting from the standpoint that the devs seem to be taking the reverse tack of other MMORPGs. Rather than throwing a big ol' banhammer at in game strategies that challenge the infrastructure they've created a work around to allow it. If only it didn't use yet another point and click, leveling grindfest, as it basic game mechanic...

And it's not exactly a 2D grid like the GP suggests. There are over 5,000 star (solar) systems but each is basically full size. It's true that like a normal star system, the overwhelmingly vast majority of that is empty space, but you can be anywhere within it. Most of the action does take place around celestial bodies, space stations, star gates, and anomalies, but EVE does a good job of making a galaxy feel mindbogglingly huge, which is appropriate.

However, in the event of an anticipated big fight, CCP will move a system to a "reinforced node" (e.g. an extra beefy server). Of interest, though, is that many fights this year have not been entirely anticipated, resulting in TiDi being the only mechanism for load handling in play. For example, Asakai was the result of an unplanned misclick - it was supposed to be a small skirmish, but turned into a massive battle

4000 in the same battle, out of 36k online in the game. There was a large battle a few weeks ago too, at least until CCP mistakenly crashed the node while trying to reinforce it with more hardware. But this one was pretty epic.

not sure what an "entity" is, but it's 4000 humans acting in a coordinated manner. wouldn't be shocked if the military manages the same with war games, but doubt that it's an order of magnitude more than that (couldn't find any numbers for omni fusion). i don't play the game, but the organizational structure for these coalitions is extensive

Next up, in order to fight lag, all new major alliance wars will be conducted as Play by E-Mail.

Actually in the very early 90s that is close to how EVE-like games worked. For the one a friend wrote and operated it was a big open ended turn based game that had one turn per day. It was EVE-like in the sense that it was space based, involved exploration, exploitation, trade, alliances, government (security and taxation), pirates, smuggling, etc.

Sounds like VGA planets to me. Man I miss that game. Play by Email, 11 races, excellent special abilities and functions, fairly easy to run and automate. Very slick for its time.

It was the one example I can give where an entire game franchise was destroyed by a virus (primary programmer was infected and it killed his 90% complete new version). Sure he had no backup, but it was 1994 or '95, and it was a one man operation. He eventually recreated a VGAP 4.0, but it never caught on like the 3.5 version did.

Just the affected server. The game is hosted on basically a supercomputer consisting of many blade servers and other hardware. Usually when a battle like this happens everything else on that server gets slowed down too (maybe 10 solar systems or so), and the devs try to move all non-essential stuff off the server, or even try to move the fight to their fastest hardware. It's safe to say, however, that most of the rest of the game was not affected at all by this battle, although its repercussions will be fel

4000 players. And their missiles/shots/drones/fighters also need to be tracked. At any time you might have up to 20 objects flying around tied to a single player, so you're tracking 80,000 things in real time. You say you can do that on a 286. OK. Pics, or it didn't happen.

Of course, this being so, there is ZERO achievement when the parent company handles a battle of any given size. "Our system simply slows down under stress" is no kind of technical achievement whatsoever. So, why is the story worth reporting? Because a record number of players fancied a rumble?

I think you misunderstand how their system works. When an event such as 4000 players in the same place at the same time all shooting at each other happens (no other MMO has come close to doing this), time in the game actually slows down in order to allow the servers to process everything. Now even though your ship is traveling at 300m/s, it will take it 10 seconds in realtime to travel 300 meters ingame. If your gun cycles in 6 seconds, it now takes it 1 minute of realtime to cycle. Game balance is unaffect

In big battles you aren't some sort of superman. You are a grunt. One of many, many cogs in a giant organization playing your role and trying to not get squashed.

The real joys of Eve are in both the subversion of structure or the creation and management of it. Being a market manipulator and crashing a market segment just because it gains you an extra 20% on your investments for several hours or creating your own empire within an empire complete with command structure, commerce, human resources and manufactu